Today an increasing number of services provided by mobile communications systems requires knowledge on personal user information. For instance, in the context of mobile shopping, where a user can purchase goods via his mobile phone, personal user information such as the user's name, credit and loyalty card details as well as shipping and billing details is required to accomplish the electronic cash transactions.
However, entering personal user information into a mobile phone is a cumbersome and error-prone task, because generally, only a reduced-size keyboard is available as user interface.
In the context of using personal user information for mobile shopping, this problem is at least partially overcome by the use of the so-called wallet solution, which allows personal user information such as credit card details to be stored in a dedicated storage location of the mobile phone, the so-called wallet. Personal user information stored in the wallet can then be made available to other applications operated by said mobile phone (e.g. applications integrated into the HTML browser of the mobile phone). Via a wallet application, the user can manage his personal user information, i.e. enter and change his/her personal user information. The personal user information stored in the wallet is secured with a special wallet code to authenticate the user to the application. The wallet solution thus eliminates the necessity to re-enter the personal user information each time when a mobile service requires personal user information.
The seamless use of the wallet requires that the user at least once enters his personal user information by starting the wallet application. However, due to the user's unawareness of the wallet application, or due to the fact that the user does not know how to start the wallet application, or due to the intricateness of entering the personal user information via the reduced-size keyboard of the mobile phone, users generally do not start the wallet application by themselves to provide their personal user information. As a consequence, the wallet can not or not properly be used with mobile services that require personal user information.